There are super many by-products in production processes. For example, a model maker can cut wood and use the sawdust to create a new product. If you mix sawdust with nail polish remover and green oil paint and let that dry, it can be used later in a model as flock. At some point, someone came up with this and word got around in the model building scene. There is also something like this in business and industry, mostly when raw materials or chemicals are processed.
By chance I have now found such a by-product, but it is digital. I've been working on my Meklet project for months now, and from that point of view it's just a list that has been made a bit more interesting with CSS. Nothing special. Now something interesting happened this weekend. I was talking to a friend and he asked me why Meklet doesn't have an about page. Or something like that, so that visitors can get a first impression about what kind of product Meklet Search is.
The question was legitimate and so I set about creating short texts explaining my project. Who. How. What. Why. Not so much at first, because there will be more questions to answer later. After I had finished the texts, I copied a content of an already finished page. By mistake I clicked into the wrong tab and copied the Meklet search sourcecode.
When I copied the first title into the source code I noticed my mistake. I still looked at the result in the Safari browser. It looked one-to-one like a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) file and I really liked that. So my main product created a by-product that I could now use for my projects. My goal was not to create a FAQ, but the design of my search fit super well with the concept. Why not combine the two?
The FAQ is super handy now, because you can open the questions one by one and don't have such a huge wall of text on your screen right away. That's something I like about ideas. Sometimes they produce more ideas and these can be used to produce new ideas. These by-products are usually even more profitable than the actual products, if you know how to publish them well. But I'm honest that I can't think of any spontaneous idea how to market a HTML/CSS only FAQ.
Robert